league ump Jim Joyce, an avid ND football junkie originally from Toledo, Ohio, who made national headlines last summer for all the wrong reasons.

Joyce blew a call at first base for what should have been the 27th and final out of Detroit Tigers pitcher Andres Galarraga's perfect game against Cleveland. Instead, Galarraga settled for a one-hit shutout. Joyce later apologized in front of the media for his error.

Reilly is even closer to Don Denkinger, another top-shelf umpire who has become defined by a mistake. Denkinger's errant safe call of Jorge Orta in the ninth inning of Game 6 of the 1985 World Series between St. Louis and Kansas City is seen by some as altering the outcome of the series.

"I worked with Don, and I know to this day he's still haunted by that one call," Reilly said. "He was a tremendous umpire and, for a period, he was as good as there was in the big leagues. And yet no one remembers him except for that one particular play he had.

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"I wouldn't be foolish enough to tell you that in my 34 years I got every one of my calls correct. I am very fortunate and thank God that I didn't have a call that was to the magnitude of Jim Joyce's call last year or Don Denkinger's.

"Part of retiring has been -- 'You've had a pretty good career. And if you stick around a year or two more, who knows?' If you're on that stage long enough, you're going to make a mistake. I'm very fortunate that I can kind of just walk off into the sunset knowing I won't be a trivia question someday."

Another factor that nudged Reilly toward retirement, something he's been mulling for the better part of the past two seasons, was that he is in good health, and that it can change on something as seemingly innocuous as a foul tip.

"Some of my colleagues have vertebrae out of place because of that," he said. "It just wasn't worth it. I've heard athletes retire, and they say, 'You know, now is just the right time.' For me it was just the right time. I'm not quite like Brett Favre."

Reilly got into umpiring almost by accident. As a student and baseball player at Kellogg Community College in Battle Creek, Reilly was looking for a way to increase his pocket money, so he took an officiating class.

He soon began to officiate basketball games.

Friends and coaches suggested that he wasn't a good enough baseball player to advance past the community college stage in that sport, so why not try umpiring?

Reilly's fast track to the majors started by taking a semester off at KCC to attend umpiring school. Beginning in 1972, he spent five years in the minor leagues, accelerating his ascent to the majors by umping in various winter leagues in the traditional offseason.

In 1977, he reached the majors, umpiring only American League games until 1999. In the 2000 season, he started working games in both leagues.

"There was a myth about the strike zone being different in the two leagues," Reilly said. "But I think when that topic would come up, it was a matter of the announcers talking about something they really didn't know. The American League strike zone was perceived as higher."

The genesis of it was the outside chest protector, called balloons, AL umps used to wear. The inside protectors, worn in the NL, generally allowed umpires to get lower for a better view of the strike zone.

"That was a long time ago," Reilly said. "Really, if you went umpire to umpire, there might be a difference, but not league to league. Some guys were considered pitchers' umpires and some hitters' umpires. But even that's much less noticeable because of this new machine called QuesTec.

"The pitches are lasered in, and we get a disk after each game showing us where the pitches enter the strike zone. So I think the strike zone for all 68 guys at the Major Leagues is much more consistent because of how everyone is evaluated. No one really stands out in that regard."

Where Reilly did stand out, beyond his proficiency, was his durability. He missed just 18 assignments in 34 years, all because of two knee surgeries.

He missed a lot more back in Battle Creek, where wife Mary was raising the couple's four children Katie, Ryan, Patrick and Conor largely single-handedly for seven months of the year.

"I always felt guilty I had her doing so many things when I was out doing what I wanted to do," Reilly said of Mary. "She did a great job. She took the kids to every baseball practice, every school thing that I couldn't do. When I came home, I tried to make up for it. But there was too much to make up for.

"Now the kids are grown, but we'll have each other. I'm really looking forward to that."